La teoría literaria a comienzo del siglo XXI: post-postmodernidad en las letras estadounidenses

TL;DR

An Argentine academic survey (Ágora UNLaR, 2018) of the "post-postmodernism" debate in US letters, with David Foster Wallace as its central exemplar. Bilevich synthesizes Mary K. Holland's "humanist postmodernism" and Robert Rebein's "neorealism" to argue that the postmodern dominant has given way to a structure of feeling that keeps poststructuralist tools but turns them toward human meaning, communication, and affect. Wallace is her recurring case: the writer who called parricide of the postmodern fathers the only way to found a new art, who diagnosed irony's absorption by commercial culture in "E Unibus Pluram," and who reframed fiction as being about what it is to be human. A Spanish-language reception source that reads Infinite Jest's author squarely through the E-Unibus-Pluram program and the sincerity turn — not through any plot crux.

Key claims

• The thesis: postmodernism has ceded to post-postmodernism. Bilevich argues the aesthetic dominant of recent decades no longer answers to postmodern paradigms and names an emerging structure of feeling (after Raymond Williams): the "categoría post-posmodernismo cubre un amplio espectro de teorías diversas" — Eshelman's Performatism, Holland's humanist postmodernism / metamodernism, Kirby's Digimodernism, and Wallace's own image-fiction, among others. She notes the dissent (Nealon reads post-postmodernism as only an "intensificación" of postmodernism).
• Wallace's parricide. As part of the generation of US writers born from the 1970s seeking to differ from the postmodern legacy, "David Foster Wallace, aunque no desconoce el mérito de los “padres posmodernos”, sentenció que el “parricidio” era la única manera de fundar una nueva expresión artística."
• Why postmodernism decayed (Wallace via McCaffery). Its decline, "según Wallace," is that "la ironía, el anarquismo, y la auto-referencialidad que caracterizaron al posmodernismo fueron absorbidos por la cultura comercial americana, con pésimas consecuencias para la estética posmoderna" — television, since the mid-1980s, "ha ido absorbiendo ingeniosamente, homogeneizando, y representando la misma estética cínica posmoderna" (our translation: has been ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and re-presenting the same cynical postmodern aesthetic) (p. 182 as cited).
• Holland's humanist reading of Wallace. For Holland, Wallace's work "es un modelo de cómo la ficción posestructuralista y la metaficción pueden permitirle al lector disfrutar de los placeres de la ficción realista […] reestableciendo el lenguaje como un mecanismo para comunicar afecto y significado" — poststructuralist fiction reoriented toward the Enlightenment/Modernist project of truth, empathy, and community.
• Wallace on fiction and being human. Bilevich quotes his McCaffery-interview credo that fiction is about what it means to be human — closing that "la ficción que no explora lo que significa ser humano en la actualidad no es arte".
• Realism, lower- vs. upper-case R. She records Wallace's distinction between a realism "con r-minúscula" and a grand realism with "R-mayúscula": "la división binaria entre realista y no realista es una distinción canónica establecida por gente con intereses fundados en el realismo con R mayúscula."
• Image-fiction ("imagen-ficción"). Wallace's name for the emergent dominant, which he defines as "una adaptación natural de las viejas técnicas del realismo literario a un mundo de los 90, cuyos límites han sido deformados por la señal eléctrica" — far from a fashionable avant-garde novelty, "casi atavística" — marking the shift from TV as object of literary allusion "de las imágenes televisivas como objetos válidos de alusión literaria, a la tv y la meta-visión como sujetos validos en ellos mismos."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest's author executes the program of "E Unibus Pluram" — a post-ironic "image-fiction" that turns television and metavision from objects of allusion into subjects, adapting realism's old techniques to a media-deformed world

• Crux: eup-connection
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [author] Wallace's diagnosis of irony's capture (Spanish rendering of the McCaffery interview / EUP): "la ironía, el anarquismo, y la auto-referencialidad que caracterizaron al posmodernismo fueron absorbidos por la cultura comercial americana." [(McCafferry s/p) as cited]
  • [author] The "imagen-ficción" definition: "una adaptación natural de las viejas técnicas del realismo literario a un mundo de los 90, cuyos límites han sido deformados por la señal eléctrica"; the shift to "la tv y la meta-visión como sujetos validos en ellos mismos." [pp. 172, 169 as cited]
  • [secondary] Bilevich's framing of Wallace as the "voz más citada" of the call to break with the previous generation's linguistic games. [sec. Post-Posmodernismo]
• Notes: The DFW quotes are the paper's SPANISH translations of English originals ("E Unibus Pluram" and the 1993 McCaffery interview) — cite-as-written in Spanish, tagged [author] but flagged as translation-of-original; the English EUP/McCaffery texts are canonical for verbatim (the archive holds the EUP anchor, e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections). A Spanish-language reception endorsement of the IJ-as-EUP-program reading. NOT new primary evidence — a second-language witness that IJ's author is read internationally through the EUP program.

THEORY: Wallace's fiction embodies a post-ironic, humanist turn — poststructuralist and metafictional technique put back in service of sincerity, affect, communication, and "what it means to be human"

• Crux: sincerity-definition
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Holland's reading, quoted: Wallace's work "es un modelo de cómo la ficción posestructuralista y la metaficción pueden permitirle al lector disfrutar de los placeres de la ficción realista […] reestableciendo el lenguaje como un mecanismo para comunicar afecto y significado." [Holland 2013, p. 176 as cited]
  • [author] Wallace's own credo (Spanish, via McCaffery): fiction is about what it is to be human, and "la ficción que no explora lo que significa ser humano en la actualidad no es arte". [McCaffery 1993 as cited]
• Notes: Endorses the New-Sincerity / humanist reading of Wallace. Secondary-critical (Holland/Rebein) plus a translated [author] credo. Reception-side, not a plot-crux claim.

Themes

Literary theory and periodization (post-postmodernism, metamodernism, neorealism); irony and sincerity (irony's absorption by commercial culture; the humanist turn); Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram" program (television, image-fiction, metavision); realism vs. Realism; fiction as a vehicle for empathy, affect, and being human; Wallace's international academic reception (read here from Argentina, in Spanish).

Cross-references

• Reads Infinite Jest's author through the same "E Unibus Pluram" program the archive anchors in its EUP source note — the Spanish-language, Latin-American reception of that reading.
• The humanist / New-Sincerity framing converges with the memorial readings of Wallace as a sincerity-serious writer in the Five Dials memorial (Zadie Smith, Gerry Howard, George Saunders) and the archive's irony-and-sincerity theme.
• Names Wallace alongside a post-postmodern cohort (Franzen, Powers, Eggers, Foer, Danielewski, Tomasula) — reception context for where critics place him.
• A Spanish-language sibling to the translation-vein sources (Blumenbach, Esposito, the French pair) — non-Anglophone reception, though this is academic framing rather than translation craft.

Notable passages

Spanish verbatim, each a single physical line of the source text (the source's own quotation marks “ ”, elision markers "[…]", and parenthetical cites preserved). English in reader prose above is our translation, not a quotation.

• "el mérito de los “padres posmodernos”, sentenció que el “parricidio” era la"
• "posmodernismo se debe, según Wallace, a que “la ironía, el anarquismo, y la"
• "ficción posestructuralista y la metaficción pueden permitirle al lector disfrutar"
• "de los placeres de la ficción realista […] reestableciendo el lenguaje como"
• "no explora lo que significa ser humano en la actualidad no es arte" (DFW's credo, via McCaffery)
• "la división binaria entre realista y no realista es una distinción canónica establecida"
• "define como “una adaptación natural de las viejas técnicas del realismo literario"